‘Africa-Ireland Relations: Current and Future’ Speech by President Higgins at Trinity International Development Initiative - Africa
Trinity College Dublin, 24 May 2018
Excellencies,
Provost,
Distinguished guests,
Dear friends,
I am deeply honoured to address so many distinguished representatives of so many nations, and in particular the nations of Africa, and so may I begin by thanking His Excellency the Ambassador of the Republic of South Africa, Ahlangene Cyprian Sigcau, for extending, on behalf of the African Embassies resident in Ireland, a most gracious invitation to join you today.
May I also thank the Provost and the Trinity International Development Initiative for hosting this conference in this week in which we celebrate Africa Day, and for providing the opportunity for me, as President of Ireland, to celebrate the long and abiding bonds shared by the people of Ireland and the peoples of the continent of Africa, and to reflect on all of the opportunities and challenges that lie before us in this new century.
The peoples of our nations share, despite the great distance in space between us, a common past, born of so many parallel historical experiences: an experience of colonialism; a struggle to preserve and remake our native cultures; and dispersed and diasporic national families.
I find it so depressing at times in the European Union and elsewhere that Africa is presented as a blank page – this continent from which our species emerged, a continent with a diversity of cultures, systems of conflict resolution and nature.
Today, we share a common destiny, one full of so much potential and so many possibilities, and a determination to create a just and sustainable future for our peoples and our planet.
Fifty-eight years ago, nearly to the day, Kwame Nkrumah, the herald of a free Ghana, came to Dublin to speak of that enduring connection, of our long and unremitting struggles to take our place amongst the nations of the world, and of the hopes for a new world order founded on peace and justice for all. At a meeting of the Irish United Nations Association in the Shelbourne Hotel, only a few hundred metres from where I stand today, he invoked, in his words, ‘those Irish leaders of the last century who realised that the struggle of Ireland for independence was not the struggle of one country alone, but part of a world movement for freedom’.
The most resolute advocates for a progressive Irish freedom had always looked for inspiration not only to the settler colonies of Australia or New Zealand, but to the peoples of Africa, of India, and of Iran, and to the examples of their struggles. Even many of those considered moderate nationalists, accused by their opponents of seeking only equal participation in the project of empire, cheered the resistance of African peoples to European colonialism.
Charles Stewart Parnell, the great Irish Parliamentary leader, denounced the invasion, in 1879, of the lands of the Zulu people and lamented that, in his words, ‘at least half of the regiments now at the Cape are composed of young men from Connemara. . . sent to Zululand to become the holocaust of… imperialism’. Reports of the resistance of King Ceteweyo and the Zulu people were met with cheers at public meetings throughout Ireland, even as many of those young men from Connemara perished in the British defeat to the Zulu army at Battle of Isandlwana, reflecting the complexity of the Irish engagement with empire.
Some of Parnell’s fellow Irish parliamentarians were, at times, more ambitious in their designs – Frank Hugh O’Donnell declared to the House of Commons that ‘Parliamentary agitation would not be effective until the Irish people, crushed down under their present tyranny, effected a coalition with the oppressed natives of India and other British dependencies’. While this did not come to pass, the great founder of the Irish National Land League, Michael Davitt, used the platform provided to him by the Westminster Parliament to denounce imperial actions in Africa, whether it was the policies of the Royal Niger Company, intervention in Sudan, or the assault on the Ashanti Kingdom.
Parliamentary agitation was effective in drawing the attention of the world and progressive opinion in the imperial heartlands to the injustice of imperial exploitation, but it could no more prevent the encroachment of empire in the nineteenth-century than it could secure Irish independence.
More radical men and women would emerge to seek to sunder forever the relationship with empire by force of arms. It was such an honour for us to welcome representatives of the nations of Africa, and of other nations, to witness our national commemorations of the centenary of the 1916 Rising, as we recalled the idealism of those men and women.
Next year, we in Ireland will commemorate the centenary of the first meeting of the Dáil Éireann of the revolutionary Irish Republic proclaimed by the Easter Proclamation. That first Dáil Éireann, established to ‘speak and act in the name of the Irish people’, would sanction and organise our War of Independence, fought to vindicate the existence of the Republic as the expression of the popular will of the people of Ireland.
In doing so, we will recall that our forebears were part not only of a national movement, but, as Kwame Nkrumah reminded us, of a global movement for national self-determination. For that first Dáil Éireann met on the eve of the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, in which the people of Egypt asserted their right to national freedom against the very same empire against which we struggled.
One the first acts of the Dáil was to issue a ‘Message to the Free Nations of the World’ which unambiguously stated that Ireland:
‘believes in freedom and justice as the fundamental principles of international law, because she believes in a frank co-operation between the peoples for equal rights against the vested privileges of ancient tyrannies, because the permanent peace of Europe can never be secured by perpetuating military dominion for the profit of empire but only by establishing the control of government in every land upon the basis of the free will of a free people’.
This declaration was revolutionary, reflecting an international spirit that had seemed to offer new hope in the midst of the First World War. Only months after the Russian Revolution, the United States and Russia – representing the two great democratic powers – demanded a peace based on the ‘Petrograd’ formula, proposed by the Petrograd Soviet and endorsed by the Provisional Government of Russia. It envisioned a democratic peace, a peace without victory, a peace based on the principles of self-determination. That moment passed, as the United States drew closer to the Western Allies, and the Bolshevik party took power in Russia, leading to hysterical opposition.
I think that it is useful – in the present moment – to recall a time when the United States and Russia stood together for an international order based on democracy, freedom, and anti-imperialism. The Peace Settlements that followed the First World War rested on very different foundations – the imperial powers simply acquired the colonies of their vanquished rivals.
The peoples of Africa would remain under imperial occupation and our Irish War of Independence would rely on the assistance not of other nations, as was hoped, but upon the Irish diaspora in the United States and across the world. For many of those who fought or supported the Irish struggle, the creation of independent Irish state was the ne plus ultra of Irish accomplishment. Yet for others - perhaps only a minority but an important minority nonetheless - the Irish struggle was part of the universal struggle of which Kwame Nkrumah spoke.
For those few, any settlement which maintained a connection to empire was unacceptable. Their most articulate spokesman was Liam Mellowes, who urged his colleagues in the First Dáil to reject the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which brought an end to our War of Independence, explaining his determination to continue the war, despite its potentially ruinous consequences for the people of Ireland, with these words:
‘[Empire] means to me that terrible thing that has spread its tentacles all over the earth, that has crushed the lives out of people and exploited its own when it could not exploit anybody else… We are going into the British Empire now to participate in the Empire's shame even though we do not actually commit the act, to participate in the shame and the crucifixion of India and the degradation of Egypt. Is that what the Irish people fought for freedom for?’
With all the great distance in time between today and 1922 we cannot presume to judge the terrible decisions thrust upon those Irish men and women of a hundred years ago. Let us recognise, however, the bravery of such an anti-imperial message, and the solidarity with other peoples which it represents. It was an impulse which did not perish, but was gradually strengthened, and as our country began the long and difficult path to achieve a final and complete sovereignty - a sovereignty of the Irish people - we did so by championing the sovereignty and freedom of other peoples, in Asia, in the Caribbean, and most particularly in Africa.
In 1936, Eamon de Valera condemned the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, stating that the failure of the League of Nations was such that it could ‘not any longer command the confidence of the ordinary people of the world’. The League of Nations had been undermined by the machinations of the great European powers, with their plans for secret bilateral pacts and constant search for imperial advantage.
The Irish state would not re-engage with global affairs until 1955, when we joined the United Nations. It was in the General Assembly of the United Nations, in a forum in which the voices of the newly free nations would be heard, that Ireland could give an answer to the question that Liam Mellowes had asked – to what end did we seek freedom?
It was Liam Mellowes’ former comrade-in-arms, Frank Aiken, who, as Minister for External Affairs, first gave shape to an Irish voice in global affairs, one willing to support the aspirations of the peoples of the world to self-determination and to a future free from war. In his first address to the General Assembly, on the 20th of September 1957, Frank Aiken declared that ‘the principle of self-determination of peoples ought, we believe, to be the great master principle by which this Assembly should be guided in its quest for a just and peaceful world order’.
He used the opportunity to speak for the freedom of one of the great nations of Africa, demanding that the French Republic, perhaps the European nation which has contributed the most to Irish freedom, ‘declare its readiness to concede the right of self-determination to Algeria’.
Excellencies,
Friends,
We must ask ourselves to what extent our thinking today supports the United Nations, and we must ask has its multilateral role not been undermined by unaccountable forces?
Tomorrow, on Africa Day, we shall mark the success of that struggle and of so many others, by celebrating the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity. The opening lines of that Charter adopted more than half century ago recall so well that moment of hope, when 32 delegations resolved in Addis Ababa to declare that ‘it is the inalienable right of all people to control their own destiny’. On that day, the 25th of May, 1963, there were peoples not yet free. Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, and Angola still faced a hard and difficult path to vindicate the inalienable right of which the delegates spoke. On that day too, the new Organisation pledged itself to the struggle ‘to put an end to the South African Government's criminal policy of apartheid and wipe out racial discrimination in all its forms’.
This was a struggle to which many Irish people would, very often with more alacrity and urgency than their Government, also commit themselves to. I do not want to elide any of the complexities of our own history, nor do I wish to affect any selective amnesia.
The majority of Irish nationalists in the early twentieth century had supported the Boer republics in the South African Wars, most of them seeing only the resistance of small republics against an imperial power, all of them ignoring the irony that those small republics had established themselves by displacing and attacking other peoples during and after the Great Trek. Seán O’Casey would write of that time that ‘every patriot carries in the lapel of his coat a button picture of Kruger, Botha, Steyn, Joubert, De Wet’.
When the National Party of South Africa instituted the policy of apartheid in 1948, the Minister for External Affairs in Ireland was Seán MacBride, whose father Major John MacBride had led the 500-strong Irish Transvaal Brigade and later received a commission from the South African Republic. 500 Irish and Irish-Americans joined Major MacBride, while over 30,000 Irish soldiers had fought for British forces during the conflict. It might be expected that such a personal history, the historically friendly links between politicians in our new Irish Free State and in South Africa, and the over 60,000 South Africans then claiming Irish descent at that time, would have inclined the Irish state towards an accommodation with the apartheid regime, or at least a lazy tolerance.
That this was not so was due to the activism of a section of the Irish people, and the leadership of South African exiles such as my old comrade Kadar Asmal, a Professor of Law here in Trinity College Dublin and the moving force behind the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement. Indeed, Seán MacBride, a founder of Amnesty International and a champion of human rights at home and abroad, was one of the most prominent Irish politicians to throw his support behind the movement. As one of the drafters of the Charter of the Organisation of African Unity, he was a stalwart of the cause of pan-Africanism and of a new international order that recognised the aspirations of all the peoples of the world.
Seán MacBride would, in 1974, be appointed the United Nations Commissioner for Namibia, where he threw his support behind the liberation struggle then being waged by SWAPO, despite all the attempts of pro-apartheid forces to maintain the illegal occupation of Namibia. In that year, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Accepting the prize in Stockholm, he used his considerable rhetorical skill to condemn those who would simply accept the world as it is:
‘Very often those who are defending the maintenance of the status quo are in fact defending the continuance of oppression or of an order which is unjust. This is so, particularly in the regions of southern Africa, where the political and economic structures are built upon racial discrimination and colonial exploitation.’
When Seán MacBride died in 1988, Oliver Tambo would write:
‘Seán MacBride will always be remembered for the concrete leadership he provided to the liberation movement and people of Namibia and South Africa. Driven by his own personal and political insight arising out of the cause of national freedom in Ireland . . . our debt to him can never be repaid.’
I believe that the arrival into our discourse of a new African body of scholarship, informed on what is not working as well as by what is possible, that calls for a reflection on Pope Francis called a ‘a culture of indifference’, is the best possible tribute to Tambo and MacBride. Africa does not need to imitate what is destructive or what is failing. It needs a Pan-African commitment to ecologically sustained economics.
The spirit of solidarity displayed by Seán MacBride was not confined to extraordinary Irish individuals – it was an important part of Irish life, one often transmitted through the Irish missionary movement, which had been active in Africa since the middle of the nineteenth century. It was the Irish men and women of the missionary orders who answered what Pope Francis has called the ‘summons to solidarity’, following their vocations to live and to work alongside the peoples of Africa.
Irish development aid and emergency relief owes so much of its origins to the extraordinary response to the emergency in Biafra in 1967. The understanding of the nature of the crisis was deepened by the presence of so many Irish members of the missionary orders in Nigeria, and in particular by the very strong presence of the Holy Ghost Fathers and Holy Rosary Sisters, and by the historical experience of the Great Hunger of the nineteenth century, An Gorta Mór, in which over a million Irish people died. Irish Non-Governmental Development Organisations such as Concern and Trócaire, who carry out so much of their work with Africans, owe much of their origin to that tradition of solidarity taught by the Irish missionary orders.
I recall meeting them in so many parts of Africa, in Somalia during the famine of the 1990s and most recently in Ethiopia.
Since its inception forty-four years ago, our own overseas development assistance programme, Irish Aid, has followed in the footsteps of Irish aid workers and missionaries. By the beginning of the 1980s, we had established long-term bilateral assistance programmes with Lesotho, Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia. Today, over 80% of an Irish Aid budget of €707 million is allocated to African partner countries, helping to reduce hunger and build resilience, enhance sustainable development and inclusive economic growth, and promote better governance and human rights.
Now we must give a lead in the European Union in giving leadership on the new models Africans will bring into being.
My predecessor as President, Mary Robinson, played a very important role in both reflecting and increasing public support for overseas assistance through official visits to Somalia and Rwanda. After her election to the Office of President in 1990, she continued her support for the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, a reflection of its growing influence in Irish society.
It was through relentless activism that the Movement gradually pushed successive Governments towards ever more activist roles. In 1970, Ireland became the first Western European state in the United Nations General Assembly to support the resolution promoted by members of the Organisation of African Unity which demanded the imposition of active sanctions against the apartheid regime, reflecting the completion of a gradual move from opposition to abstentionism to support. However, for a time the state would continue to cleave to the policy of ‘constructive engagement’ advocated by some of its powerful European partners and by the United States.
To those of us committed to the Anti-Apartheid Movement was deeply disappointing. We recognised that principle of international solidarity demanded nothing less than ending all forms of collaboration with apartheid. This was the policy of the African National Congress, and reflected public opinion throughout Africa, represented by the consistent support of the Organisation of African Unity for that policy.
The profound moral courage of ten workers, nine women and one man, at Dunnes Stores, a supermarket chain in Ireland, was to be a huge factor in changing Government policy. One summer day in 1984, a young worker, Mary Manning, answered the call to solidarity issued from her union and refused to handle any South African goods. She and her nine comrades were suspended by her employer. At first, it was a lonely struggle but in time the Irish people came to give their full support to the workers.
In 1987, the Irish Government finally bowed to popular will, and became the first Western country to ban South African imports, invoking International Labour Organisation conventions which enabled nation-states to prohibit imports produced using forced labour. The apartheid state had, at that time, institutionalised a policy of forcing black prisoners to work for white farmers in the most punishing of conditions.
It was a long-delayed, but nonetheless important, alignment with the policies of the Organisation of African Unity, and a demonstration of the solidarity of the people of Ireland with the liberation struggle of the people of South Africa.
Excellencies,
Dear friends,
Since 2001, it has been the African Union which has given expression to the aspirations of the peoples of Africa for a united, democratic, peaceful and economically emancipatory continent, one that will promote human rights, human development and equality, not only at home, but through its solidarity, around the globe.
That unity of purpose will be required in this century more than ever, for our shared planet now confronts great challenges: the resolution of conflicts, ancient and new; the inequalities in wealth, income and power that are deepening and which divide our societies and weaken social cohesion; the urgency of welcoming those fleeing war, persecution and natural disaster; and above all the unprecedented and potentially catastrophic effects of climate change brought about by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere.
These challenges are global in their reach and in their scope, and they can only be met by global solutions co-ordinated through the regional and global institutions capable of representing the majority of the peoples on this planet, the African Union, the European Union, and the United Nations.
If I have been speaking of empire, and quoting Liam Mellowes, is it not the case that we are in conditions of globalised, financialised, ruthless capital, not dealing with something that is even more deadly, affecting more people and all of our prospects than imperialism and colonisation? We might ask ourselves is it that we have surrendered to that as inevitable or whether we have lost the courage to challenge what is in front of us.
The Sustainable Development Goals agreed by 193 nation states in New York two and a half years ago represents a vital moral achievement and could be the means by which we organise and measure our progress in meeting these challenges in the coming decades. The Irish and Kenyan Ambassadors to the United Nations were appointed by the President of the General Assembly to facilitate the negotiation of the Goals. As President of Ireland, I am very proud of the role that the partnership between Ireland and Kenya - Europe and Africa – played in ensuring that all the voices within the General Assembly were heard.
Three months after that historic agreement in New York, the 21st Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came to a historic settlement and in doing so finally recognised the demands of climate justice. In the lecture he delivered when he received the Nobel Prize in 1974, Seán MacBride spoke of the imperatives of survival in the 20th century, which he believed required nothing less than the fulfilment of the United Nations Charter: a universal and lasting peace.
In this century, the imperatives of survival of so many of the peoples of the world will rest on the willingness of the Parties to fulfil the pledges they made in Paris, both in terms of the mobilisation of resources for climate change adaptation and in the commitment to maintain the global temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius.
Five years ago, Hailemariam Desalegn Boshe, addressing the General Assembly as Prime Minister of Ethiopia and as chairperson of the African Union, stated that ‘the 21st century will be an African century’.
With every passing year, the truth of this statement becomes more apparent. Demographic facts alone make this so. More than any other place on earth, the continent of Africa will be at the centre of our global challenges – it is there the imperatives of survival will be felt most urgently. And more than any other place on earth, the continent of Africa has the potential, the energy, and the courage to lead the world in overcoming our shared challenges.
It faces us with a global challenge. Will we have the courage to allow the flow of technology, science, in practice and with personnel to flow without borders to Africa? Africa cannot wait for it to become presented as attractive to international capitalist investment. That will be too late.
When now so many speak of the need to deliver a new symmetry between economy, ecology, and ethics will we allow it to emerge or will we condemn Africa to what are failing paradigms? Can we seriously suggest that the extension of the present unaccountable corporate practices, with their absence of transparency, is enough to turn our words into realities?
These are issues to which Irish academics continue to make important and urgent contributions. May I single out one scholar from this institution, Dr. Pádraig Carmody, who has made a very important contribution to charting the evolving relationship of the so-called BRICS nations, both between South Africa and the other BRICS, and between the BRICS and the rest of southern Africa, and the role of trade, development and debt play in that relationship.
The consequences of the ongoing reliance, by so many countries, on an anti-ecological model of extractive industries – which amounts to the cancellation of the future - are ignored at our peril.
This scholarship is a reminder that more than any other place on Earth, the continent of Africa is now, and will be, the crucible for the global challenges that we confront in this century. It is bearing and will continue to bear the greatest consequences of climate change, with all the possible implications for the displacements of people, the degradation of the environment, and the eruption of new conflicts over diminishing natural resources that it brings, and will bring.
The International Monetary Fund estimates that, by 2030, the contribution of Africa to, as they put it, the increase in the global labour force will exceed that from the rest of the world combined. By 2050, the continent of Africa will contain 2.5 billion people, nearly 1.3 billion of whom will be young people. By 2060, Africa will be the only region on the planet with a growing number of people of working-age. We should see this in terms of its possibilities rather than reacting with fear. We have to step up to the plate as intellectual work, policies and co-operation.
By the mid-century, Africa will then be the continent of the young, with over forty percent of the young people of this planet living there. In a continent rich with natural wealth, it is the people who will be the greatest source of development. Africa has the potential to be the continent of promise and opportunity in our twenty-first century. It will carry the hopes, the dreams and the ambitions of our shared planet. It can be a continent in which a new symmetry of economics, ecology, ethics and solidarity will be built, where science and technology will know no border, nor any hostile end, but will be delivered with humane purpose.
This will only be accomplished if the global community remains true to the commitments that we made in 2015 in New York and in Paris. The greatest danger is not that some nations resile from their promise, but that some nations were not truly authentic in their words, that they do not intend to endure the difficult changes demanded of them, whether in terms of their efforts to de-carbonise their domestic economies or in sanctioning the changes to the global political economy that I believe will be required if we are to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.
Those nations should look to Africa. I have witnessed there some of best examples of the kind of international co-operation and authenticity of intention required in this new century. Two months ago, I had the opportunity of hosting the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, Ms Monique Barbut. The Convention has demonstrated that land degradation can be combatted through new land management practices, equitable land tenure arrangements, and re-afforestation programmes, and the objective of combatting desertification has now been fully integrated into the Sustainable Development Goals.
It is in Africa that such a goal has found an initiative equal in its ambition, in the proposed established of the Great Green Wall, a zone of land restoration stretching 8,000 kilometres from Dakar to Djibouti. In its breadth of vision, it is so characteristic of its progenitor, Thomas Sankara, the former President of Burkina Faso, who saw in the Great Green Wall a means to bring together many of the nations of Africa in a single transformative continental enterprise, one capable of uniting not only the Governments but the peoples of Africa in a common endeavour.
Excellencies,
Dear friends,
Fifty-eight years ago, Kwame Nkrumah left Dublin to attend the inaugural ceremony of the Organisation of African Unity. Addressing those assembled, he looked to the struggles ahead, saying:
‘On this continent it has not taken us long to discover that the struggle against colonialism does not end with the attainment of national independence. Independence is only the prelude to a new and more involved struggle for the right to conduct our own economic and social affairs; to construct our society according to our aspirations…’
In this century that struggle continues. It is upon the question of whether it is to be an African century, one shaped by the aspirations of the continent of young, capable of meeting their needs and realising their possibilities, that our future depends.
Ireland means to be a part of this African century. We have shared a long and sometimes difficult history; as subjects of empires, searching, sometimes together, for freedom and independence; as free nations, seeking to shape that independence towards a sustainable future. It is through solidarity with the African struggle for liberation that Ireland founds its place amongst the nations – it is through that solidarity that Ireland found a purpose for our national freedom.
It is now time to deepen and extend our co-operation to meet the challenges of this century. The Irish Government has committed to increasing our overseas development assistance budget to 0.7% of Gross National Income by 2030. It is also committed to increasing trade and investment with African nations. I welcome these commitments.
The fifth African Union-European Union summit at Abidjan represented another step in regional co-operation and I know that we all look forward to the finalisation of the plan for the framework for co-operation for 2018 to 2020. The agreement between the EU and 79 countries, including so many of the states of sub-Saharan Africa, agreed at Cotonou eighteen years ago is due to expire in 2020. A renewed agreement is an opportunity to place the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Accord at the centre of what must be a partnership of equals. These talks cannot be mere extensions of what went before. They must break new ground, be radical, be brave, in facing down those opposing multilateral solutions.
For many years, the United Nations General Assembly has been the chamber in which the voice of the peoples of Africa was heard. Yet this has never been sufficient. It is time now to correct the historic imbalance towards African nations in the Security Council.
When I spoke in the General Assembly at the High-Level Meeting on Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace in New York two months ago I said that we must discard any narrow or cynical realism. The young of the world are appalled by the suggestion, now too frequently made, that what is normative is for the General Assembly and that the strut of the powerful and the wielders of power must prevail in the Security Council. I suggested then that we should heed the lost hopes of our collective pasts, the pleas for wisdom that were the whispers from the gallery, when so many of the newly free states of the world - of Asia, the Caribbean and of Africa - brought the hopes of their people to the United Nations.
Excellencies,
We in Ireland are now presenting ourselves as a candidate for a non-permanent seat on the Security Council for the 2021-2022 term. In doing so, we seek to draw upon our long tradition of pursuing peace and supporting disarmament, our role as co-facilitator with Kenya of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and our sixty-year history of participating in United Nations peacekeeping missions. Two months ago, we worked with all the Member States of the United Nations in our role as Chair of the Commission on the Status of Women to propose policies to support women in rural areas across our planet.
As a candidate country, we are asking for the support of the nations of Africa, and we in turn can assure you that you can rely on the continued support and solidarity of Ireland and the Irish people.
In this new century, let us go forward and pursue together a diplomacy of the common good, practiced with courtesy, respect and deliberation, and eschew any simply transactional diplomacy based on perceived short-term national advantage. Yes, let us make it together an African century.
